Sandberg: Facebook would run Blackburn ad taken down by Twitter
At Axios' live event in D.C., Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg told Axios that Facebook would run the Marsha Blackburn ad announcing her Senate campaign, which claimed Planned Parenthood sold "baby body parts" and was taken down by Twitter — even though Sandberg said she personally disagreed with the views expressed in the ad. "When you cut off speech for one person, you cut off speech for other people," she said.
U.S. tech giants hiring more foreign workers on H-1B visas
Prominent U.S. tech companies obtained more H-1B visas in 2017 than in 2016, according to a new study by the National Foundation for American Policy using fresh data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. At the same time, several of the largest India-based companies saw a decrease in approved petitions for the second year in a row.
The big picture: Total petitions for H-1B visas for the 2019 fiscal year fell by about 9,000, mostly due to a decreasing numbers of H-1B petitions from India-based firms. However, the study shows there is still a strong demand for H-1Bs in the U.S.
Behind the numbers:
Foreign students: International students account for 81% of the full-time graduate students at U.S. universities in electrical engineering and 79% in computer science, per the report. That could be a contributing factor to the high number of H-1Bs used by U.S. tech companies, hoping to retain high-skilled workers trained in the U.S.
The other side: Shivendra Singh, Vice President of NASSCOM, which represents India's IT industry, told Axios that India-based companies are using fewer H-1Bs due to changes in needed skills, more local hiring by U.S. companies, and the use of new technologies that require "more non-STEM, managerial-type talent that is more readily available in the U.S."
Yes, but: Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for lower legal immigration levels, tells Axios that "these trends reflect an effort to eliminate large-scale abuses of the program... Not surprisingly, higher approval standards would produce an approval bias in favor of U.S.-based corporations."
What to watch: NFAP's study highlights that Tesla, Uber and General Motors were all approved more than 100 H-1B petitions last year. Visa demand by these companies is likely to increase with the rise of new autonomous vehicle technologies.
This visualization shows the 15,723 objects being tracked in low-Earth orbit by the U.S. military's Joint Space Operations Command — including nearly 13,000 that are classified as space debris.
Data: Space-Track; Note: Perigee is the point in an object's orbit where it's closest to Earth. Chart: Lazaro Gamio/Axios
"The magnitude of the problem is unquantified. We can’t put a solid risk on it [for satellite operators]. But we all know it is only going to get worse."
— Moriba Jah, University of Texas at Austin
"There's a lot of ambiguity about what is up there and where it will be an hour from now, tomorrow or next week," says Jah, who's building a database in hopes that it will lead to "[global] rules of the road for good behavior" in space.
Two challenges: Jah says the resolution for tracking objects is currently on the order of kilometers, and "most of the things up there aren’t transmitting their information."
The bigger picture: The military's public database "account[s] for only 4% of the objects in space, according to AGI, a company which provides software to commercial and government entities to analyze and track objects," per CNBC.
Notable: 2,842 of the roughly 3,800 objects in low-Earth orbit associated with China are from Fengyun 1-C, a weather satellite launched in 1999. China used it as a target for a missile test in 2007, spewing fragments throughout space.
The details: In low-Earth orbit, the overwhelming majority of objects are pieces of satellites, rocket bodies and boosters, and other human-made objects-turned-debris. And that doesn't include bits and pieces that aretoo small to track but are still potentially damaging.
The data: Space-Track.org is a collection of data from the Joint Space Operations Command, which tracks objects orbiting Earth in order to screen for potential collisions.
